Josh-Kerr.com

Its official, as of November 9th I will no longer be working for Avanade. I’ll be working for a company called Final Support as a programmer analyst. Essentially it’s the same job with no travel. Avanade was a great company to work for, great pay, benefits, perks, etc. I choose to leave because I was given an opportunity to work for another great company with many of the same perks/benefits and not have to travel. So, I’ll get to spend every night at home which is worth its weight in gold. If you’re single, a decent .NET programmer or MS engineer, and don’t mind travel, give Avanade a call. Keep in mind, you’ll be gone Monday thru Thursday and sometimes Friday for months at a time with maybe a couple of weeks between projects at best. If you’re cool with that, I’m sure you’ll enjoy working for them. Don’t listen to them if they say, “Monday thru Thursday for 3-4 months and then your home for a moth or two training.” That’s where they got me.

The company that I work for has staffed me on a project in Austin. While I cannot go into detail about what the project entails I can discuss some of the cool toys I get to work with. The best thing about being staffed on this project is that the location is on the South side of Austin and I live on the North East side of San Antonio. It’s just a strait 1 hour drive to and from work. So, instead of leaving home on Monday and not being back until Thursday night, I’m home every night. The drive is actually an easy drive and I do stay in Austin on Thursday nights and sometimes Mondays. We can leave after 12:00 noon on Friday so there’s no point in me driving an hour to work only 4 hours…. Now, on to the toys.

FLEXNet Studio is a Macrovision product that stands out the most to me. My task on the project is to repackage applications to get them ready for Active Directory and SMS to push them out to the clients. Thankfully all the clients are Ghost Images so uniformity is a Godsend. Using this tool, I load up a virtual pc image, take a “before” snapshot of the computer, install the application, and take an “after” snapshot. Once I’m done with that the program will list any and all differences found on the pc; folders, ini files, shortcuts, registry entries/changes, etc. I can then build an MSI off of the changes made to the system. Is it legal? Yes. I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t. A very cool toy indeed. To bad the price starts at $1700 for the standard license!

Ghost is another cool toy that I’ve been getting to play around with. Many of you are probably saying, “Ghost, whoop-ti-do!” Well guess what, I’ve never used it before. Ghost is a great tool to create an image of our system. The uses of Ghost are almost endless and it has been another Godsend for me. When testing my repackaged applications, Ghost lets me refresh the machine back to the initial state in less than 20 minutes! God bless the man who invented Ghost. Along with Ghost is BartPE. My knowledge of this is still very limited but I like the idea of booting up a box from the CD and interactively ghosting a machine. There’s a lot more to it but I haven’t played around with it too much just yet.

I just finished reading this article on Slashdot and it amazes me how childish some people can be. Jack Thompson is the lawyer who is sueing Rock Star Games (GTA everyone) for making a “cop killing training simulator responsible for the murder of a pair of cops.”  While the GTA series is indeed very graphic and questionable, I question Jack’s logic in this case.  Yes, I know that he’s a lawyer trying to make his name known and make millions of dollars, but come on.  Sue the game maker for making a violent game with a rated M for mature ERSB label on it?!  Nevermind the fact that the kid who killed the cops was even old enough to by the game.  Why isn’t someone sueing the person who gave him the game?!  Read the article, decide for yourself.

teph, some freinds of ours, and myself went to the David Crowder Collision tour last night and I must say it ROCKED!!! The openers, Robbie Seay Band and Shane & Shane were awsome too.  I’ve never heard the Robbie Seay Band before but I must admit I was impressed.  I’ve heard that they’re pretty good and that was an understatement.  They were very good!  Shane & Shane have a couple of hits you hear all the time on KLOVE but I’ve never actually seen them live.  Awesome.  And then there was the David Crowder Band.  I’ve seen them once before and they knows how to rock the house!  If you can go see them, GO!

Back in July Stephanie and I placed an order for a new bedroom set from a wholesale company based out of Dallas. We were told that it would be 6-8 weeks before we’d get our furniture. No problem I thought to myself, remembering that we have to pay in full on delivery. I’ve got some time on my hands to check the budget, make any adjustments, etc. After waiting patiently for 10 weeks we called them up wondering where our furniture was.

“Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t have it in Queen, only in King.  We’re no longer carrying that set for the time being.”

Go figure!  Thanks for calling us and letting us know, we’ve only been waiting 10 weeks!  Anyways, after the little setback we looked at their other options and ended up ordering the King.  Heck, it was only a $150.00 difference between a Queen and a King, plus we had the “hook up” on a mattress and box spring.  We placed the order on Monday, it arrived on Friday.  While moving the furniture off the truck the only thing I could think was, “God bless the man who invited the dolly.”

Today I put the dolly to use again as I moved the existing furniture into the spare bedrooms and the new in the master.  Looks great if I do say so myself.  Here’s a link to the furniture that we bought.  We bought the bed with posts, two nightstands, dresser with mirror, and the armoire.

Let me start out by saying that yes, I use Google. It’s the best search engine out there and they’ve been “tearing it up” for some time now. I use the personalized home page, I have two GMail, have a Blogger that I don’t use any more, love Google Earth, and installed their toolbar on both IE and FF. I use Google. But something has been annoying me for a while now, non-stop Google talk! As an advid Slashdot reader all I’ve seen is Google this and Google that! Enough already. Google is great, they write great software, have some of the finest minds working for them, and they’re worth 4+ billion dollars. Congratulations Google. But why is it if Google farts, there’s 50 news articles about them farting and the new fart app that farts out miscellaneous Google text on command? [Sarcasm] Case in point, Google buys a couple of domain names, next thing you know, “GBrowser, its coming everyone get ready!” Quit freaking out everytime Google does something!

Just got the word, it seems that I’ll be traveling again for work. Thankfully the project is in Austin, an hour away, and it supposed to only last for a month. The last thing that Stephanie and I need is to have another Charlotte, NC type project. Five months back and forth, leave at 6:00AM on Mondays and get back around 10:00PM on Thursdays. Definitely not fun as a married couple.